Quote Originally Posted by luckyluckyme View Post
I went back to store order forms & catalogs & pieced this together.
Floy Joy, Right On & Touch saw cd release on 9/12/89. They were again featured on pg. 3 of the 1/30/90 flyer as they were being released on cassette. The Greatest Hits & Rare Classics series was made available on 2/26/91. Suprisingly New Ways But Love Stays was finally added on 7/2/91.
By the 1993-94 catalogue only the Greatest Hits & Rare Classics is listed under The Supremes heading.
The Supremes general catalog was in disarray by the end of 91 thanks to the majority owners of Motown deciding that MCA wasn’t promoting the label’s product so they set up a rival distribution deal with Polygram. This would drag out for a couple of years until MCA sold the label to them in 93 only for a reorganized Universal to wind up buying Motown in 99. All that briefly printed catalog with only a few exceptions wound up in cut out bins as a result of the multi label chaos in the mid nineties. Since Polygram agreed to take back MCA printed titles, a lot of catalog that didn’t instantly sell just got dumped rather than reprinted. I fished Right On and Touch CD’s out of a Tower NYC clearance outlet in 95. The next year I found an entire 30 count box of We Remember Sam Cooke discs at the Lincoln Center HMV. Had I known what folks would eventually pay for them I would’ve bought them all. I believe I paid like 5-7 bucks each for them.

I do remember the seventies albums outside the GH&RM were never in the artists section by the mid nineties when I started looking for CD’s. Generally a few comps like the 95 version of Anthology, the original GH broken into two volumes, I Hear A Symphony, & Farewell were common in NYC. Talk Of The Town & CW & Pop lasted about a year before disappearing. The main Ross solo titles beyond hit sets were Diana Ross 76, Touch Me In The Morning, DR70 but retitled Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, An Evening With…, and Diana 80. Her RCA titles were long out of print so I had to wait for that comp the label did in 97 to get anything not covered by the Forever box.

The cassettes were much easier to find for a couple of years. New Ways But Love Stays and Reflections I found at Big Lots in Michigan for 3 bucks. Sing HDH & A Go Go at a Boston HMV for four dollars. A few other odds and ends popped up over time until I stopped buying tapes around 98.

When I started using eBay around 98-99 folks were paying stupid money for the CD’s. I even caved and bought TCB for a hundred bucks. At least Universal still hasn’t reissued it to justify me spending so much!